The cast of “The Snow Queen” was rehearsing in a cramped Midtown studio, the floor littered with costume pieces, props and musical instruments, as staff members watched and took notes. “Oh, the journey is the end, and the end is the beginning,” the actors sang, ahead of their own beginning: the opening of their production, which runs through Sunday in the annual New York Musical Theater Festival.

The show, a coming-of-age tale about a girl who encounters a variety of obstacles on her journey to rescue her best friend from harm, is based on the same Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale as the popular Disney film “Frozen.” The show’s themes of persistence and determination are fitting. Two of its creators, Rick Lombardo and Kirsten Brandt, lost their jobs last month as artistic director and associate artistic director of the San Jose Repertory Theater, when it closed and filed for bankruptcy. “The Snow Queen” had its premiere last year at that theater, where it was well received.

Although the New York production, which was not financially tied to San Jose Rep, was already in the works when the theater shut down, it was transformed from a side project into a significant enterprise for the creators, who include Haddon Kime, the composer of the contemporary pop-rock score.

They decided to forge on, having already raised about $65,000 for the production. (Mr. Lombardo directs and wrote the book with Ms. Brandt; all three collaborated on the lyrics.)

“It’s pretty important to me right now that this is happening, and that it’s happening at this particular moment in time is poignant in a number of ways,” Mr. Lombardo said in an interview after a rehearsal last week.

It’s also pretty risky. Producing any show in New York City is a gamble that rarely pays off financially, and presenting one at the musical theater festival is among the diciest of such bets. With a handful of performances, the producers of “The Snow Queen” need to make an impact quickly to capitalize on the exposure and help secure a future for their production.

Mr. Lombardo and Ms. Brandt said in interviews that they hoped to see “The Snow Queen” become a staple of future regional theater seasons. If it takes off after the festival run, it will also create work and income for the creative team while helping to salve the wound left by the closing of San Jose Rep.

“I was in mourning,” Mr. Lombardo said. “It was the same grief I felt when my parents died.” When he was informed by the board of trustees that the theater was going to close, he was in rehearsal at the Rep for the American premiere of “Landscape With Weapon,” a play by Joe Penhall. He’d probably still be in mourning, Mr. Lombardo said, had it not been for “The Snow Queen.”

As he set his hopes on the show, which opened on Monday, Mr. Lombardo was also addressing criticism about what led to San Jose Rep’s closing on his watch. Regional theaters can struggle even in the best of economic times, but there are some who assert that San Jose Rep was partly responsible for its own demise. Critics say the theater’s leadership didn’t do enough to embrace the diverse community of San Jose, the 10th-largest city in the United States, with about a million residents, of whom only 43 percent speak English at home. People of Asian and Hispanic descent make up large portions of the population.

“From a pure business perspective, not acknowledging two-thirds of your potential audience through thoughtful programming and outreach to new audiences would be considered shortsighted at best,” Tlaloc Rivas, a writer, director and assistant professor at the University of Iowa’s theater program, wrote in an email. “At worst, it constitutes deliberate indifference to communities of color.”

Mr. Rivas added, “It’s easier to lay the blame on a poor economy and lack of funding resources than to address the community question.”

Mr. Lombardo, 55, countered that Mr. Rivas doesn’t live and work in San Jose, and said he was well aware of the importance of engaging the San Jose community. Creating programming to achieve that goal was one of the aspects of being an artistic director that inspired him to leave New York City, where he cut his teeth as a director years ago, he said. He was the producing artistic director of New Repertory Theater in Newton and Watertown, Mass., for 13 seasons before assuming the helm in San Jose in 2009.

Simply choosing productions by Latino or Asian writers is not enough, though, said Mr. Lombardo, who argued that attracting and keeping audiences is complex. Last year, the Rep presented the West Coast premiere of “Disconnect,” by Anupama Chandrasekhar, which is set at a call center in India whose workers contact Americans who are behind on credit card payments. While the play was chosen partly to appeal to the area’s large contingent of South Asians, Mr. Lombardo said, it was not a success.

“This play appealed to the Indian community and brought us new theatergoers but failed to reach most of the Rep’s more traditional audience, so it turned out to be a net minus in terms of ticket sales,” he said.

Neither Mr. Lombardo nor Ms. Brandt expressed anxiety about finding work. She also teaches at the University of California at Santa Cruz and is directing a production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” that opens on Thursday at Santa Cruz Shakespeare.

Mr. Lombardo said he was confident that he would have freelance directing opportunities and might do some teaching as well. But he holds out hope of becoming an artistic director again.

“I actually like to create art that starts a dialogue with a community, and to do that with theater, to have an ongoing community dialogue, you have to be an artistic director,” he said. “I’ll either find another home, or I’ll make another home.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C2 of the New York edition with the headline: Hounded by Reality, Staging a Fairy Tale. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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